:: in.a.mirror.dimly ::

On certain occasions when I’ve served with my in-law’s prison ministry, I’ve met some men who were entangled in the occult and all sorts of dark magic. Their conversion experiences were dramatic, spiritual encounters with Jesus. They remind me that Christianity is dealing with real spiritual powers.

I recently learned about Kristine McGuire who is a former “Christian witch.” She wrote about her experiences with the occult in a book entitled Escaping the Cauldron: What You Should Know About the Occult.

I think Kristine raises some issues that are worth considering. The little that I’ve learned about spiritual warfare has been beneficial in my own Christian walk.

Christine offers a perspective that is beyond anything I’ve ever encountered, which speaks to a void in our Christian discourse today. My interview follows. Enjoy!

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Over the summer a month passed without much seeming to happen between myself and God. Oh, things weren’t too bad, but it was all quiet and stuff when I prayed. I was used to getting some kind of sense of God’s will from my prayer time, but that didn’t happen for a few weeks.

What was going on?

I know that God has answered my prayers in the past and ministered to me and through me. I have also seen God speak to and use others. What was up? As my prayer time fell flat, I began to doubt a bit. Had God given up on me? Was I just making stuff up in the past? Was I classifying my emotions in the divinity category?

That season passed. Well, it sort of passed. I heard God say “Intercede” one day, and it was like old times all of sudden. I was praying for other people, rather than my own issues, and I was on the same page as God for a while—at least, until things quieted down again and some doubts crept in.

I still get extremely introspective at times, but thankfully God still breaks in and screams into my little troubled world, “Get out of there!” I come out, go back in, wonder why things are not clicking with God, begin to doubt, and then he has to snap me out of it again.

There are plenty of reasons why we may doubt God. Speaking from the context of American evangelicalism where the Holy Spirit gets treated like a footnote in the Bible when he/she should be a main character, it’s easy to turn Christianity into this game of information and report cards. Behave and get the answers right, and you’re good.

The trouble is that we can unwittingly shut God out of our lives and not know why or how it happened. I can’t tell you why you have doubts or how to get rid of them. That’s something you need to seek out in the quiet place by yourself and with a trusted group of Christian friends who can handle hearing you say, “I’m not so sure about God sometimes.”

What I can say is that I’ve stared into that void. I’ve wondered whether God is real or whether God really cares about me, and he’s come to me. Not right away. Not when I demanded he show up. Not even in the way I expected. But he came.

As I learn to wait, to remain open, to listen, and to get out of my own head, he can speak to me, use me, and tell me how he really feels about me, about you, and about the world. How does he feel about us? He loves us with an intensity that will one day drive out our doubts and fears, even if we imperfectly move toward his Kingdom, stumbling forward and backward and forward again—and again.

Doubts can be a daily struggle. They can be normal. But God wants to move us away from them and into his love. Perhaps the first step to overcoming doubt is believing that last sentence is true.

I can still remember laboring through the book Redemption Accomplished and Applied while in seminary. Maybe it’s a helpful book for some Christians out there, but for me it stood for a kind of mechanical, almost formulaic Christianity that failed to connect with real life.

As I moved through each carefully detailed step in redemption, I thought the process was too detailed and therefore easy to misunderstand. The language was technical and precise. If I missed one part of the redemption process, what would become of my faith?

I don’t want to sound overdramatic, but that theology book almost wrecked my faith. I thought to myself: If this really is Christianity and redemption, do I really want to be a part of something like this? Is God really this technical and complicated in his dealings with us? It made the Bible, a book alive with passion, poetry, and real life, feel like a scientific manual.

I have since realized that my struggle was not with the nature of Christianity, but rather a particular approach to Christianity—a specific theological approach among many. Jesus didn’t lay out the Kingdom of God in a technical step-by-step guide. He used stories, parables, and Spirit-filled action.

The truth is all in there, but the presentation is quite different.

In a sense, theology aims to take what’s in the Bible, understand it, and then present that interpretation so that we understand the Bible better. When theology becomes a kind of meat grinder that refashions the Bible to the point that we can’t recognize it, we have a problem.

Good theology can help us study the Bible and actually understand what it means. Good theology will lead us away from fear and sensationalism when we understand that the book of Revelation was Apocalyptic literature. Good theology will explain what the “Kingdom of God” could mean in the teachings of Jesus. Good theology will try to figure out how Jesus influenced the letters of Paul.

Good theology brings clarity to the Bible and helps us grow in our Christian faith, knowledge, and practice. Do we know God better at the end of the day? If our answer is no, then we need to take a look at the kind of theology we’re studying.

I’m sure that the author of Redemption Accomplished and Applied had every intention of making the work of Christ clear for readers. He paid great attention to detail, and I don’t want to say that he is in danger of ruining the faith of all who read this book. It’s not necessarily a dangerous book by any means.

However, in my own case, that book represented a kind of lifeless theology that did not push me closer to God. Even theology books that are technically correct, as that book was to a certain degree in its content, can have unintended effects on their readers. Isn’t it ironic that the study of God can sometimes turn us away from our subject?

We moved to Connecticut about a year ago, and a big part of that move involved letting go of things: our lifestyle in the country (including a garden), our professional networks, our home, our few friends, proximity to family,  and the list goes on. Toss in the stress of selling our home and moving, and there were times when we felt crushed by the pressure.

Letting go feels terrible sometimes, even if we know that we’re following God’s lead into something else. That’s because we have a period of time when we’re empty, holding nothing. That is, we’re stripped of the many things we value.

When we move and let go of things, we have an opportunity to root ourselves in our unmovable and unshakable God.

Last year I had sleepless nights as rejection letters replaced my regular pay check and our house sat two months longer than we would have liked. We had to start over professionally and personally from scratch in a new place.

In the midst of that emptiness and brokenness, God showed up in new ways that I still cling to in dry times.

And then he began to fill us up again with new things we like to do, new friends, and new opportunities. Between the growth and the new blessings that came, I realized that letting go wasn’t all that bad after all, even if it was tough at the time.

It’s not like we had a carbon copy of our old life after we moved, but once we let go of one set of things, we found both a deeper connection with God and new things to love. The trick is to remain dependent upon and full of God as we embrace these new things.

It’s also important to remember God’s provision for us so that we’ll be ready to move when he calls us to something else.

This little survival guide series aims to offer some ways to help you flourish as a disciple of Jesus, and part of thriving as a Christian is learning what you need and what’s the dead weight you can toss overboard. Let’s face it, we can spend  a lot of time worrying about the nonessentials.

I study theology, so I’m all over that one.

One of the things Christians get worked up over are these things called absolutes or absolute truth. Last week I heard a speaker extol absolutes as essential for the survival of Christianity. Are they really?

Part of the problem is we don’t have a clear notion of what they are, and there are all kinds of imperfect explanations out there that cloud the issue.

Then we spend our time at conferences learning about how Christianity is going to disappear from the face of the earth because the young people in your youth group don’t believe in absolutes. We all know that fire and brimstone from heaven will follow that, which sort of makes all this talk about “global warming” a bit of a moot point.

God’s like, I’ll show you godless liberals some global warming!

So, let’s begin by asking what this absolute business is all about and then talk about whether we need them. Hint: we don’t, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

What are Absolutes?

Part of the absolute discussion revolves around how we frame our questions and definitions. For the sake of brevity, I’ll ask two related questions:

Is there is a universal, scientifically verifiable perspective on the world?

Can human beings have a universal, scientifically verifiable perspective on the world?

Both of these questions get to the heart of what absolutes are all about. The trick is that Christians have to insert some caveats into such philosophical questions that sort of take us out of the realm of religion.

You see, absolutes and the idea of a universal perspective are the product of the modern/Enlightenment movement of philosophy when the scientific method was applied to all aspects of life, including religious belief. While Christianity and core doctrines such as the resurrection are based on solid evidence and reliable witnesses, we unfortunately cannot say, reproduce the resurrection in order to verify it in an absolute, universal sense.

However, this way of defining truth collapsed upon itself in the late 20th Century. With the rise of globalization and an awareness of multiple perspectives on the world, many realized that level of certainty is a bit tough for humans to reach. In fact, as Christians, we can chalk that quest for certainty up to human pride and claim that only God has such a universal perspective.

Is there certain, absolute truth out there? To a certain degree, yes, but only God knows it in that sense. That’s not our place.

Do We Need Absolutes?

Some may say that I’m killing Christianity, but the truth is that our faith rests in part upon, well faith. There is a measure of mystery and uncertainty as we rely upon both truth and the experience of God. Keep in mind that God gave the Israelites both laws to keep and a tabernacle where they could meet him.

Christianity does not boil down to beliefs, law, or words on a page.

And speaking of Israel, let’s remember that Christianity began in an Eastern context in which Enlightenment principles of knowledge would have seemed over the top. Movements such as postmodernism and relativism have reacted strongly to the unrealistic expectations that absolutes have placed on truth and knowledge.

Christians can say that truth has its limits, but it’s also not a truth-free-for-all. God has revealed to us what is right and what is wrong, and he has incarnated the truth in the person of Jesus. We continue to experience truth through the work of the Holy Spirit.

Far from being stranded on the rapids of relativity, Christians have scripture and the Spirit as their paddles. We may not know as much as we’d hoped, but then again, Christianity has survived and even thrived in contexts other than the Enlightenment. Absolutes do not guarantee the survival of the Christian faith.

In fact, in order for Christianity to continue to thrive, we need to make sure we aren’t letting either the old context or the new context to determine our beliefs and practices. The modern and postmodern have been both friends and foes to disciples. Our faith can survive in both, but it’s up to us make sure we don’t anchor ourselves in either of them.

I used to work in a church office. I’d run ministry meetings, organize volunteers, print the bulletin, and do the 1,000 other things that came up. Sometimes I’d poke through Christian catalogues and stumble upon the July 4th bulletin collection.

Imagine a billowing, majestic American flag with the sun streaming into it from the top right. Now, arrange a looming cross in front of it like a lunar eclipse, and you’ve got yourself a symbol of Christian nationalism for whole family of God.

The message was something like this: Jesus supports America. We might add a footnote: America now has nuclear weapons and God on its side, so watch out world.

Mixing religion with a nation and its politics, whether conservative or liberal, is called syncretism.

Syncretism is defined as:

“the attempted reconciliation or union of different or opposing principles, practices, or parties, as in philosophy or religion.”

What Does It Look Like?

While everyone should support the laws and politicians that best jive with their values and beliefs, syncretism with politics and Christianity typically mixes the priorities of America with those of Jesus. The trick is that Christians can support legislation from a religious standpoint and not commit syncretism.

Confused yet?

Here’s where the main difference occurs: Who is leading us? Is God and the Kingdom leading you? Or is it a politician or political party? If a politician is leading you and Jesus is just tagging along, then there’s no telling what kind of nasty things a politician, whether liberal or conservative, will ask him to do.

Conservatives and liberals both ask things such as “Approve this war please Jesus?”

American Jesus replies, “Oh, of course you can America. America’s safety is way more important than my naive ‘love your enemies’ command.”

However, if Jesus is leading us, we can still use politics as a tool at times. Government has a function among us to maintain order, even if we can debate the size and role of that government when it comes to particulars. Therefore, if we want to combat human trafficking, there is a place for legislation that assures human rights.

At the same time, that does not rule out the place of personal and communal responsibility for us. I know that some liberals can fall into the trap of thinking that voting for a Democrat is the end of their social justice obligations. It’s one I’ve made and have struggled to correct.

If we do get into the political game, we can lose ourselves quickly to the sway of Christian syncretism when politics promises to solve our problems and to usher in all of the good things we desire. We just need to sign ourselves up as foot soldiers for a political party to reap the benefits.

Once we associate Jesus with a nation and a particular political party in that nation, we shrink the Kingdom of God. The whole earth is the Lord’s. He does not share his glory and power with any person or nation.

Political syncretism demands that we mix the priorities of a nation or political party with those of God’s Kingdom. The Beatitudes shared during the Sermon on the Mount make for a lousy political platform.

Jesus said: Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

Politics says: Blessed are the fighters and aggressors…

Jesus said: Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.

Politics says: Blessed are those who respond in kind…

Jesus said: Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.

Politics says: Blessed are the strong and proactive who take preemptive action…

Politics are not evil in and of themselves. They can be used for good in some circumstances as one tool among many at our disposal. However, politics and national priorities cannot be mixed with God’s Kingdom. The notion of a Christian nation is absurd in that no nation would ever consistently embody the ways of God’s Kingdom. 

Christianity can influence and impact a nation via the Kingdom’s bottom-up agenda. We should want more Christians in America because more Christians will influence our nation to embody the values of the Kingdom.

However, once we join the priorities of the Kingdom with those of a nation, the Kingdom of God will lose every time. Having a cheesy, patriotic bulletin will be the least of our worries then.

The other day I dug into the ways that Christians misuse the Gospel for political and national goals. It was a tough post to write because I don’t want to be the angry truth police guy. I also don’t want anyone to think that Christianity is hopeless.

It’s easy to pick on the things that are negative rather than highlighting what’s in good working order. The latter stories are not as exciting to write or read. However, I felt that an issue like that needs to be exposed because it can subtly undermine the Gospel.

It’s ironic because while at a Christian writer’s conference last week I kept a running list of silly things Christians say/believe and reasons for hope. I had a hunch that the good news would outweigh the bad. They did. While I hit upon one really discouraging note the other day, I still have many reasons to believe that God can use his people to do a lot of good based on what I saw and heard at the conference.

So here are some significant reasons why Christians have hope…

There was an emphasis on suffering…

No one shared a prosperity Gospel. One speaker said, “Some of you have not suffered enough to write and minister as effectively as you one day will.” That is a powerful statement that hits upon the results of joining Christ in the fellowship of his suffering.

There was a diverse crowd…

This was a fairly diverse conference both ethnically and theologically. While some of the political junk got in the way at times, I was encouraged to see a diverse group of Christians working, worshipping, and hanging out together.

There was an emphasis on mission…

The Christians at this conference were actively seeking to share the Gospel with others. Time and time again I was challenged to go deeper in my walk with the Lord and to use my gifts for his work. That was probably more significant for me than the excellent writing workshops I attended.

There was an emphasis on solid research and writing…

The workshops I attended shared valuable advice on how to write good articles and books without resorting to unfair arguments, bad facts, and other emotional tricks. The workshop leader, who struck me as rather conservative politically, shared the ways he writes charitably about the political left and the nuances he found in the midst of his research.

There is an openness to the Holy Spirit…

If the people of God remain open to the leading of his Spirit, then we have the greatest reason for hope provided his people continue to let him lead.

While we find plenty of things to avoid or disavow, there are some great reasons to have hope in what God can do among and through his people.

What signs of life and hope have you seen in the past few weeks?

Over the past weekend I had a chance to hear a variety of Christians speak about writing and our call to be ambassadors for Christ. For the most part I was encouraged by the sincerity, kindness, and insight shared among these believers.

However, at certain key points I heard speakers, some who spoke to large crowds, sharing a kind of counterfeit version of the Gospel that almost left me in tears. I’d like to address this matter, but I want to avoid words like “danger” or “threat” that just inject venom and anger into these discussions. I’d rather just say that I heard some sincere followers of Jesus clouding and possibly distorting the Gospel and particularly our motivations for sharing it.

I’ll spend the majority of my time focusing on my understanding of the biblical witness concerning what the Gospel does and why we should share it. I’ll end with a few words of caution about ways Christians have distorted these ideas.

What Does the Gospel Do?

The Gospel reconciles us with God. I think we can all agree on that. As we join others who share the same Spirit and relationship with God, we form the people known as the church. We have all been saved and sustained in the same way.

The Gospel makes us citizens of God’s Kingdom, which is the other worldly and this worldly place where his will is done. When we pray, “Your will be done, your Kingdom come,” we are asking God’s Kingdom to expand on earth as his will is done.

Why Should We Share It?

We share the Gospel because Jesus asked us to do so, because it is the way others can be saved, and because God intensely loves his creation and longs that all would come to know him. We don’t share the Gospel to preserve our churches, to ease our egos, or to give a soul fire insurance. We want others to know the joy and freedom that comes from knowing Jesus today, sharing in his sufferings, and moving toward eternal life with him.

What’s at Stake

In getting back to our problem of a distorted Gospel. I heard several speakers challenge the Christians present to preach the Gospel in order to preserve America’s Christian character and to prevent God’s judgment from falling upon us. One speaker made it clear that Democrats were to blame. Such teachings cloud the real reasons why we should share the Gospel and what it accomplishes.

I used to think that America was a Christian nation, so when I speak of Christians who operate from this assumption, I can identify as a former insider. The trouble is that the Kingdom of God cannot be affiliated with the agenda of any one nation since the Gospel is Good News for “all people” and “all nations” are blessed through Abraham.

In addition, classifying America as Christian at its founding raises serious historical questions since many founders were deists, slave owners, and generally greedy and corrupt. While some may have resembled evangelicals today, crediting good fortune to Providence—a common practice among the founders—did not make someone a Christian.

Christian sociologist Bradley Wright has also found that there is a much higher proportion of Christians in America today than during the Revolution. We could point at some places where Christianity impacted the founding of America, but calling America a Christian or godly nation from the start is a mistake that only white Americans could make. Our African American friends have much to teach us in this regard. America’s history is not a fall from grace spurred on by Democratic politicians. It’s more realistically a mix of high and low points.

Having said that, we should not ignore the possibility of God’s judgment. The Old Testament shows that time and time again God will judge a nation that neglects the poor, allows corruption, attacks its enemies without mercy, and concentrates wealth among the few to the detriment of the many. These are real, bi-partisan problems to consider in America.

Nevertheless, we should seek righteousness and preach the Gospel not as a means to preserve America or to keep America as a Christian nation. That turns the Gospel into a self-serving, political tool that unintentionally brands unbelievers and sometimes Democrats into religious terrorists who are calling down God’s judgment on America and only the true patriots will hold off destruction through their preaching.

In a sense, this kind of thinking turns the objects of God’s desire, those who do not know him, into enemies who are ruining our country and our place as the keepers of our country. Christians are servants who are called to follow Jesus and Jesus alone. Even allegiance to one’s country cannot be allowed to cloud the goals and motivations behind our calling.

I won’t say that such teachers are ruining Christianity or America, but they are distorting their Christian practice with political agendas and suspect history. As I stated in Coffeehouse Theology, an unexamined context can influence our theology and fool us into thinking that we are free from its influence.

Sadly, there are still some evangelicals who are failing to consider how American culture and particularly conservative politics are skewing their understanding of the Gospel and our mission as believers. They can be Christians who happen to be American patriots. That’s a different conversation. Our problems come when they create a Christian patriotism that uses the Gospel as a means of preserving America.

America is not the light on a hill. The light is Jesus shining through his people—a people that is not limited to those found in America.

Today is my 31st birthday, and it also marks the one-year mark for our time in Connecticut. A lot has changed over the past year, and I’ve learned many a hard lesson.

In many ways I feel like the writing/publishing industry gave me a bloody nose. I had certain plans and goals for this past year that were not realized, but we’re still standing and I’ve learned so much. In the past three months I’ve had enough significant breaks and lessons that I feel like I have something solid to build upon.

In addition, I have learned that my writing location is vitally important for my creativity. Sitting in our new apartment with its large, south-facing windows, my writing has taken off. I can feel the muse stirring within. Ideas, characters, and scenes are coming together much faster.

It’s also been encouraging to see how our marriage has grown and strengthened in the midst of all the changes that our new lifestyle brings—she as a graduate student and myself as a full time writer.

However, there are three really big surprises in my walk with the Lord from the past year that make me stop and pinch myself. Here’s the run-down:

We live in Connecticut.

While dating Julie I used to drive through Connecticut on my way to visit her and often sat in traffic jams. While there I would dream of Connecticut falling into the ocean, or Long Island Sound, so I could drive straight from New York to Massachusetts. And now I live in Connecticut.

The thing is, parts of Connecticut are pretty nice. We’re in the hilly northeast section that has a lot of small towns and farms. It’s not Vermont, but we’ve found many things to enjoy. During walks in the woods we find old stone walls and apple orchards, the local farm movement is growing, and we’re not too far from the ocean.

Connecticut is not our ideal location, but it’s been a good place to live for the past year, even if the snow here really sucks for cross-country skiing.

I’m using my love of gardening for ministry.

While in my church’s ministry garden last night, I dug up a section of lettuce that failed to beat out the weeds and replanted it with beans. As I prepared the row for the beans on that cool summer evening, I realized there was no other place I’d rather be. Later today I’ll drop off a small harvest from our ministry garden at a local soup kitchen, the second share of what will hopefully be a growing harvest.

It blows my mind to realize that God has given me not only a passion for gardening, but a way to use it in ministry to others. Our 700 square foot garden may not produce too much food for the local soup kitchens, but I can see the seeds that are being sown. Even if the harvest is modest this year, I am happy to be part of what God is up to in our area.

God continues to push me deeper into who he is away from who I am.

Over this past year I continue to learn to place the most value in knowing God. While trying to sell our house last fall, God taught me to seek him before seeking solutions to my problems. In addition, it’s been easy to seek success in my work before seeking success with him.

I feel like there are steps forward and backward in this regard, but it can be a joyful process to the degree that I learn to delight in him and his presence rather than my own fleeting accomplishments. That is a tough lesson to learn, but it has lasting consequences.

The last post in my Christian Survival Guide series dealt with the details of overcoming sin, and today I’ll cover the defensive measures we can take against sin in the future:

Finding a Permanent Solution to Sin

There will be times when we forget about God’s victory over sin, slip into our old sinful habits, and then repent. Sin can make inroads even after we have claimed the victory and experienced God on the mountaintops of our lives.

While we can claim the spiritual victory over sin and break its iron grip on our lives, we can still submit to our old desires. It’s like a cancer patient rushing out of the recuperation room to beg the doctor, “Please put that tumor back in, we had such a good time together!”

However, even after breaking sin’s hold in some pretty significant ways, I have learned in my experience that there is another step to the process of defeating sin. We can essentially tell sin to not only go away, but to never come back. While our ultimate victory comes when we are connected to Christ our life-giving vine, the Gospels relate stories in which Jesus not only cast our demons, but he instructed them to never come back.

In other words, Jesus took both offensive measures and future defensive measures against evil spirits. In a sense, he bound them. Now, here’s where the intellectuals such as myself can become suspicious. I know some of my friends probably think I’m full of it, and these passages have been twisted to mean all kinds of wacky stuff, but Jesus gave his followers authority to bind things on heaven and earth. That extends to the spiritual realm when we are dealing with sin.

This is a tough area to speak with complete certainty, but I do know that the light came on for me in my own struggles with sin when I realized I could not only defeat sin through the power of Christ, but also “bind” it by his authority. That doesn’t mean I’m a perfect, super-Christian now, but I have never made so much progress in my Christian life until I learned to say to my sin, “Get out, and never come back!”

I often think of this authority in terms of closing the door on sin and locking it out. However, that means we can still choose to unlock and open the door to sin. Perhaps we can reach a place where we never consider opening that door, but I can’t speak to that personally.

The next post in this series will tie all of this together to make sure it sticks…